Many natural locations of special beauty, ugliness, majesty or historical significance have come to be called sacred throughout the ages.  Natural forms singled out for sanctity range from hills and mountains, to caves and lakes, to forests and wells, even down to individual trees and stones.  Many sacred places are associated with local deities and some ancient pagan ceremonies, however watered down, still survive into our modern era. 

Well-dressing in the Derbyshire Dales is surely a post-Christian survival of some ancient pagan sacrifice to the gods or goddesses of the local wells.  Despite the protests of such worthies as St. Anselm, who in 1102 A.D. condemned such idolatory, in Derbyshire, at least, the early Christian Church absorbed rather than suppressed the practice.  Today, interdenominational services are held to "bless" the well-dressing (if not the actual well) and many of the colorful "dressings" have Christian themes.  Decorating the dressings is a communal effort and the traditional and exclusive use of natural materials, such as bark, mosses and flower petals is probably echoed in the exclusive use of natural materials in the decoration of the floats for the Annual Rose Parade in Pasadena, California!

The early Church's takeover of sacred pagan precincts was not always so benign.  Sacred groves were sometimes felled so that churchs and abbeys could be built in their place.  But in Britain, the church came into direct conflict with the crown and today, after several centuries of religious and civil strife, many abbeys lie in ruins, haunted, perhaps, by those same more ancient spirits they once sought to supplant.

Morgan's May-Eve concert is a hedonistic secular celebration, but the spirits his music awakens may be very ancient, indeed.